Latest news with #AmyLarocca
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Perilous Spread of the Wellness Craze
For many Americans, health care is something to be dreaded and deferred—a source of pain, wasted time, or financial hardship. For luckier Americans, it could mean curling up on an exam table in a med spa and receiving a 'gravity' colonic. Amy Larocca's new book about the wellness industry, How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time, opens with the author undergoing exactly this procedure, against doctor's orders. The water forced into her colon will, she writes, discharge toxins, and the result will 'change my life, provide perspective and purpose and a near-ecstatic lightness of being.' Larocca, a reporter who spent two decades covering fashion for New York magazine, is being somewhat facetious. But only somewhat. She can't deny being a willing participant as well as a skeptic, and she's far from the only woman who has chased the idea of being not just healthy but well—a state she describes as the new 'feminine ideal.' Wellness is a $6.3 trillion industry, according to a 2024 report from the Global Wellness Institute, an industry trade group. That's bigger than the GDP of Germany, and nearly four times the size of the global pharmaceutical industry. The real growth has been within the past 10 years—the GWI's report calls it the 'wellness decade.' And women represent most of its consumers. In a nation known for its relatively poor health, nearly everybody seems to be thinking about how to be healthy: According to a 2024 report from McKinsey, 82 percent of U.S. consumers consider wellness to be a 'top or important priority in their everyday lives,' and 58 percent said they were prioritizing wellness more than they had the previous year. Another year on, even more has changed. With Donald Trump's appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of Health and Human Services, the ethos of wellness has been incorporated into the 'Make America healthy again' movement, a cause marked by extreme skepticism about conventional medicine (including vaccines) and extreme openness to purported alternative cures. MAHA reached a new apotheosis this month with Trump's nomination of the wellness influencer Casey Means for surgeon general. Means graduated from medical school but does not have an active medical license, having dropped out of her surgical residency because she 'saw how broken and exploitative the healthcare system is,' as she wrote on her website. Although she's expressed skepticism about the national vaccine schedule for children, some MAHA adherents are worried that she's not anti-vax enough. If confirmed, she will join Mehmet Oz within the broader ranks of HHS; before being tapped to lead the Medicare and Medicaid programs, he was a celebrity physician and daytime TV host with a history of espousing unreliable medical advice. Mainstream medicine may have good reason to frown on these government officials, but their rise to power is explicable: Americans are exhausted from navigating a health-care system so costly and inconvenient that it has sent many of them scrambling for alternatives. [Read: The wellness women are on the march] MAHA is such a young movement that Larocca's book couldn't be expected to account for it. But the author deftly transcribes the writing on the wall. Wellness culture spread 'like a rash,' she writes, showing up in the places you might expect—The White Lotus, the influencers selling detoxes to Los Angeles wildfire victims—and the places you wouldn't. The Financial Times, for example, recently published an article on the scientifically challenged practice of somatic 'tapping,' under a vertical titled 'Adventures in Woo-Woo.' Art in America's recent 'Spring Wellness Issue' features a story about Marina Abramović's rebirth as an alternative healer. (The 78-year-old artist hawks 'longevity drops' for roughly $130.) And good luck attending a wedding free of woo-woo this summer: An event planner told The New York Times last month that about 75 percent of the weddings she organizes contain a 'wellness element'—sound baths, beach yoga, or 'spiritual-growth sessions,' for example. The well women overtook the fashion world long ago: While researching this article, I received an invitation from the designer Maria Cornejo for a gathering at her downtown boutique. She was promoting not her latest collection but a new book on longevity. 'Ayurvedic mocktails' were promised. How to Be Well sets out to capture the depth and breadth of the wellness invasion—its fads, its legitimate practices, and its so-called cures. Larocca details the impressive variety of forms wellness can take: ingesting supposedly magical super-ingredients (ashwagandha, matcha, hyperlocal honey), chasing spiritual highs from fitness classes (SoulCycle, Peloton), or attending a $1,000 wellness-focused 'traveling road show' from Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's health company, valued several years ago at $250 million. There is something old and something new in this welter of products and practices. Even as the movement repackages traditional practices from China and India, it also promises better health through data collection, biohacking, and at its most extreme end, the Silicon Valley cult of longevity advanced by Peter Thiel and others. Larocca homes in on the often-caricatured type of the Lululemon-wearing, Pilates-toned girlie—'hopped up on her plant-based diet and elaborate adaptogen regimen'—whom she got to know well during her years writing about the fashion world. But she also devotes space to its advocates on the far right, including the conspiracist news site Infowars, which shills some supplements containing the same on-trend ingredient—ashwagandha root—that features in products sold by many mainstream wellness companies, including the Los Angeles hippie-chic brand Moon Juice. The nomination of Means represents a merger between these anti-establishment forces on the left and the right. MAHA is generally associated with its own version of health and wellness—downvoting vaccines, seed oils, and hormonal birth control while promoting ideas ranging from the basic or commonsense (wholesome school lunches and preventive medicine, good; pesticides and microplastics, bad) to the dubious or risky (raw-dairy consumption, skipping shots, eschewing fluoride). Under Trump, MAHA's big tent draws in snake-oil salespeople alongside skeptics, paranoiacs, and ideologues. Uniting them is a deep disdain for the health-care industry. After critics pointed out that Means never finished her medical residency, Kennedy replied on X, 'Casey is the perfect choice for Surgeon General precisely because she left the traditional medical system—not in spite of it.' Larocca asks: 'Is wellness just consumerism, or is it a new politics, a new religion?' Perhaps it is all three. If MAHA is a religion, it represents a kind of prosperity gospel in a country where access to health care is often determined by wealth. 'Good health in America has been elevated as a luxury commodity as opposed to a fundamental right,' Larocca writes. The average American, she notes, spends just 19 minutes a year talking with a primary-care physician. Meanwhile, the average member of Parsley Health—a 'direct primary care' health-and-wellness clinic whose standard membership costs $225 a month without insurance—spends at least 200 minutes a year being listened to. In short: To get that kind of attention from a doctor, you'll have to pay dearly for it. [Read: America can't break its wellness habit] Nearly a third of Americans don't have adequate access to primary-care services, including regular checkups, a 2023 PBS News report found. And 40 percent of adults reported that they were delaying or forgoing doctor visits because of high costs. More than a third of all U.S. counties are 'maternity care deserts,' lacking a single obstetrician or birthing facility. The country spends more than twice as much money on health care as other high-income nations, with worse outcomes: 40 percent of Americans are obese, and six in 10 adults have a chronic illness. For both the affluent and the aspirational customer, wellness seems to hold the promise of bridging a gap in medical care. The cost of wellness products and services has a very high ceiling, but the barrier to entry is low—almost anyone can purchase a $38 jar of adaptogenic 'dust' that claims to improve your mood, and that option is much easier than bushwhacking your way toward finding a therapist who takes insurance. But most alternative cures are no more affordable than conventional medicine. Neither are members-only urgent-care practices that come with wellness bells and whistles. Sollis Health, for example, promises an average wait time of three and a half minutes or less—if you can pay its annual fee of at least $4,000. The wellness industry and the MAHA movement may draw from different political cultures, but they both operate from a place of fear: We can't control skyrocketing infections or health costs, but we can try to manage—or at least tinker with—how we feel inside our bodies. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, 'taking care of yourself was going to be the only way to get through our terrifying new world,' Larocca writes. Particularly attracted to wellness's promises are women and people with chronic illnesses (also often women), Larocca writes, in part because the concerns of both groups have historically been played down by doctors. I find much truth in this argument, as many of my own forays into wellness have followed unsuccessful attempts to treat various ailments through the modern medical system. After years of visits with doctors to manage my migraines (none would prescribe one of the many available migraine medications; one suggested that I visit the ER if things 'got really bad'), I found the solution in acupuncture and an individualized prescription for herbs. This successfully treated both the headaches and the joint pain roundly waved off by my rheumatologist. But the cure was costly: The herbs set me back $200 a month, the acupuncture $175 an hour—and you can imagine how much of this was covered by insurance. Larocca does a good job of both explaining the wellness industry and ferreting out its scammier corners—the way that, for example, a variety of cleanses, clean-eating programs, and fasts are almost indecipherable from disordered eating. But she doesn't quite answer the bigger question: What are we owed in terms of our health? How much of it is our responsibility, as consumers, and how much can be laid at the feet of a government that has failed to create wide-scale solutions? [Read: How did healing ourselves get so exhausting?] That depends on whom you ask. The wellness industry views health as an individual pursuit, one that requires us to be model consumers and do the work necessary to recognize which goods and services to pay for. MAHA, meanwhile, seems to want to use the top-down power of legislation to mandate nutrition-labeling reform, limit the use of pesticides in our food system, create stricter rules for vaccine development, and call for the removal of toxins (however the government defines them) from the environment. (So far in his tenure, RFK Jr. has focused on redundancies at HHS, slashing thousands of jobs.) But other messaging suggests that MAHA prefers to shift the burden onto the individual, too. 'Once Americans are getting good science and allowed to make their own choices, they're going to get a lot healthier,' RFK Jr. said in a November interview with NBC. So maybe we're on our own, either way, when it comes to curing what ails us. Finally, you might be wondering: Does any of the stuff detailed in the book actually work? In her conclusion, Larocca, who has subjected herself to more wellness treatments than can be listed here, points to the solutions we already know: hydrate, sleep, exercise, eat plants instead of processed foods, seek out 'the best medical care you can manage.' (Hah.) She doesn't recommend a single product, practice, or service, although she does name one tip that helped her. Spoiler alert: It's a simple breathing exercise. And it's free. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
29-05-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
How Health Became a Luxury Commodity
For many Americans, health care is something to be dreaded and deferred—a source of pain, wasted time, or financial hardship. For luckier Americans, it could mean curling up on an exam table in a med spa and receiving a 'gravity' colonic. Amy Larocca's new book about the wellness industry, How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time, opens with the author undergoing exactly this procedure, against doctor's orders. The water forced into her colon will, she writes, discharge toxins, and the result will 'change my life, provide perspective and purpose and a near-ecstatic lightness of being.' Larocca, a reporter who spent two decades covering fashion for New York magazine, is being somewhat facetious. But only somewhat. She can't deny being a willing participant as well as a skeptic, and she's far from the only woman who has chased the idea of being not just healthy but well —a state she describes as the new 'feminine ideal.' Wellness is a $6.3 trillion industry, according to a 2024 report from the Global Wellness Institute, an industry trade group. That's bigger than the GDP of Germany, and nearly four times the size of the global pharmaceutical industry. The real growth has been within the past 10 years—the GWI's report calls it the 'wellness decade.' And women represent most of its consumers. In a nation known for its relatively poor health, nearly everybody seems to be thinking about how to be healthy: According to a 2024 report from McKinsey, 82 percent of U.S. consumers consider wellness to be a 'top or important priority in their everyday lives,' and 58 percent said they were prioritizing wellness more than they had the previous year. Another year on, even more has changed. With Donald Trump's appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of Health and Human Services, the ethos of wellness has been incorporated into the 'Make America healthy again' movement, a cause marked by extreme skepticism about conventional medicine (including vaccines) and extreme openness to purported alternative cures. MAHA reached a new apotheosis this month with Trump's nomination of the wellness influencer Casey Means for surgeon general. Means graduated from medical school but does not have an active medical license, having dropped out of her surgical residency because she 'saw how broken and exploitative the healthcare system is,' as she wrote on her website. Although she's expressed skepticism about the national vaccine schedule for children, some MAHA adherents are worried that she's not anti-vax enough. If confirmed, she will join Mehmet Oz within the broader ranks of HHS; before being tapped to lead the Medicare and Medicaid programs, he was a celebrity physician and daytime TV host with a history of espousing unreliable medical advice. Mainstream medicine may have good reason to frown on these government officials, but their rise to power is explicable: Americans are exhausted from navigating a health-care system so costly and inconvenient that it has sent many of them scrambling for alternatives. MAHA is such a young movement that Larocca's book couldn't be expected to account for it. But the author deftly transcribes the writing on the wall. Wellness culture spread 'like a rash,' she writes, showing up in the places you might expect— The White Lotus, the influencers selling detoxes to Los Angeles wildfire victims —and the places you wouldn't. The Financial Times, for example, recently published an article on the scientifically challenged practice of somatic 'tapping,' under a vertical titled ' Adventures in Woo-Woo.' Art in America 's recent ' Spring Wellness Issue ' features a story about Marina Abramović's rebirth as an alternative healer. (The 78-year-old artist hawks 'longevity drops' for roughly $130.) And good luck attending a wedding free of woo-woo this summer: An event planner told The New York Times last month that about 75 percent of the weddings she organizes contain a 'wellness element'—sound baths, beach yoga, or 'spiritual-growth sessions,' for example. The well women overtook the fashion world long ago: While researching this article, I received an invitation from the designer Maria Cornejo for a gathering at her downtown boutique. She was promoting not her latest collection but a new book on longevity. 'Ayurvedic mocktails' were promised. How to Be Well sets out to capture the depth and breadth of the wellness invasion—its fads, its legitimate practices, and its so-called cures. Larocca details the impressive variety of forms wellness can take: ingesting supposedly magical super-ingredients (ashwagandha, matcha, hyperlocal honey), chasing spiritual highs from fitness classes (SoulCycle, Peloton), or attending a $1,000 wellness-focused 'traveling road show' from Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's health company, valued several years ago at $250 million. There is something old and something new in this welter of products and practices. Even as the movement repackages traditional practices from China and India, it also promises better health through data collection, biohacking, and at its most extreme end, the Silicon Valley cult of longevity advanced by Peter Thiel and others. Larocca homes in on the often-caricatured type of the Lululemon-wearing, Pilates-toned girlie—'hopped up on her plant-based diet and elaborate adaptogen regimen'—whom she got to know well during her years writing about the fashion world. But she also devotes space to its advocates on the far right, including the conspiracist news site Infowars, which shills some supplements containing the same on-trend ingredient—ashwagandha root—that features in products sold by many mainstream wellness companies, including the Los Angeles hippie-chic brand Moon Juice. The nomination of Means represents a merger between these anti-establishment forces on the left and the right. MAHA is generally associated with its own version of health and wellness—downvoting vaccines, seed oils, and hormonal birth control while promoting ideas ranging from the basic or commonsense (wholesome school lunches and preventive medicine, good; pesticides and microplastics, bad) to the dubious or risky (raw-dairy consumption, skipping shots, eschewing fluoride). Under Trump, MAHA's big tent draws in snake-oil salespeople alongside skeptics, paranoiacs, and ideologues. Uniting them is a deep disdain for the health-care industry. After critics pointed out that Means never finished her medical residency, Kennedy replied on X, 'Casey is the perfect choice for Surgeon General precisely because she left the traditional medical system—not in spite of it.' Larocca asks: 'Is wellness just consumerism, or is it a new politics, a new religion?' Perhaps it is all three. If MAHA is a religion, it represents a kind of prosperity gospel in a country where access to health care is often determined by wealth. 'Good health in America has been elevated as a luxury commodity as opposed to a fundamental right,' Larocca writes. The average American, she notes, spends just 19 minutes a year talking with a primary-care physician. Meanwhile, the average member of Parsley Health—a 'direct primary care' health-and-wellness clinic whose standard membership costs $225 a month without insurance—spends at least 200 minutes a year being listened to. In short: To get that kind of attention from a doctor, you'll have to pay dearly for it. Nearly a third of Americans don't have adequate access to primary-care services, including regular checkups, a 2023 PBS News report found. And 40 percent of adults reported that they were delaying or forgoing doctor visits because of high costs. More than a third of all U.S. counties are ' maternity care deserts,' lacking a single obstetrician or birthing facility. The country spends more than twice as much money on health care as other high-income nations, with worse outcomes: 40 percent of Americans are obese, and six in 10 adults have a chronic illness. For both the affluent and the aspirational customer, wellness seems to hold the promise of bridging a gap in medical care. The cost of wellness products and services has a very high ceiling, but the barrier to entry is low—almost anyone can purchase a $38 jar of adaptogenic 'dust' that claims to improve your mood, and that option is much easier than bushwhacking your way toward finding a therapist who takes insurance. But most alternative cures are no more affordable than conventional medicine. Neither are members-only urgent-care practices that come with wellness bells and whistles. Sollis Health, for example, promises an average wait time of three and a half minutes or less—if you can pay its annual fee of at least $4,000. The wellness industry and the MAHA movement may draw from different political cultures, but they both operate from a place of fear: We can't control skyrocketing infections or health costs, but we can try to manage—or at least tinker with—how we feel inside our bodies. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, 'taking care of yourself was going to be the only way to get through our terrifying new world,' Larocca writes. Particularly attracted to wellness's promises are women and people with chronic illnesses (also often women), Larocca writes, in part because the concerns of both groups have historically been played down by doctors. I find much truth in this argument, as many of my own forays into wellness have followed unsuccessful attempts to treat various ailments through the modern medical system. After years of visits with doctors to manage my migraines (none would prescribe one of the many available migraine medications; one suggested that I visit the ER if things 'got really bad'), I found the solution in acupuncture and an individualized prescription for herbs. This successfully treated both the headaches and the joint pain roundly waved off by my rheumatologist. But the cure was costly: The herbs set me back $200 a month, the acupuncture $175 an hour—and you can imagine how much of this was covered by insurance. Larocca does a good job of both explaining the wellness industry and ferreting out its scammier corners—the way that, for example, a variety of cleanses, clean-eating programs, and fasts are almost indecipherable from disordered eating. But she doesn't quite answer the bigger question: What are we owed in terms of our health? How much of it is our responsibility, as consumers, and how much can be laid at the feet of a government that has failed to create wide-scale solutions? Read: How did healing ourselves get so exhausting? That depends on whom you ask. The wellness industry views health as an individual pursuit, one that requires us to be model consumers and do the work necessary to recognize which goods and services to pay for. MAHA, meanwhile, seems to want to use the top-down power of legislation to mandate nutrition-labeling reform, limit the use of pesticides in our food system, create stricter rules for vaccine development, and call for the removal of toxins (however the government defines them) from the environment. (So far in his tenure, RFK Jr. has focused on redundancies at HHS, slashing thousands of jobs.) But other messaging suggests that MAHA prefers to shift the burden onto the individual, too. 'Once Americans are getting good science and allowed to make their own choices, they're going to get a lot healthier,' RFK Jr. said in a November interview with NBC. So maybe we're on our own, either way, when it comes to curing what ails us. Finally, you might be wondering: Does any of the stuff detailed in the book actually work? In her conclusion, Larocca, who has subjected herself to more wellness treatments than can be listed here, points to the solutions we already know: hydrate, sleep, exercise, eat plants instead of processed foods, seek out 'the best medical care you can manage.' (Hah.) She doesn't recommend a single product, practice, or service, although she does name one tip that helped her. Spoiler alert: It's a simple breathing exercise. And it's free.
Wall Street Journal
28-05-2025
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
‘How to Be Well' Review: In Search of the Glow
Women were once supposed to be skinny. Now they need to be skinny and have a glow obtained through some combination of daily yoga and vegan makeup. 'Every generation of American women has had to wrestle with an imaginary ideal, some caricature of femininity to chase and, crucially, to buy.' So writes Amy Larocca in 'How to Be Well,' an exploration of the multitrillion-dollar industry hawking everything from supplements to wearable sleep monitors. Today's ideal, Ms. Larocca writes, is the 'well woman, hopped up on her plant-based diet and elaborate adaptogen regime.' This enviously healthy lady might appear to be an improvement on earlier unattainable ideals. 'But look a little closer,' the author writes, 'and she is alarmingly the same.' Ms. Larocca, in a series of mostly funny but occasionally scathing chapters, describes how the wellness industry developed, what it has become, its occasionally sensible ideas and its many foibles. Big wellness promises that with time and effort—and a lot of cash—anyone can achieve health. But since health is largely correlated with income, Ms. Larocca writes, this new gospel has 'the side effect of exposing some of the greatest inequities in modern American life.' Ms. Larocca, a longtime fashion journalist, is at her best when lampooning the wellness industry's excesses. Some of Lululemon's early leggings, for example, were made from a yarn that the clothing company 'claimed to be a seaweed-derived substance that relieved stress through osmosis.' (The claim was debunked.) Ms. Larocca decides to try colonics—flushing the colon with a liquid, which supposedly removes toxins. Some enthusiasts rave about the way they feel after the procedure. The author instead reports that she 'spent the evening with a terrible case of the cramps and feeling a bit absurd.'
New York Times
12-05-2025
- Health
- New York Times
What It Takes to Be a ‘Well Woman'
When I met the writer Amy Larocca at a cafe in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn on a recent afternoon, I could not help but notice: She had the glow. Or seemed to. The glow, as Ms. Larocca explains in her new book, 'How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time,' is what happens when you purify yourself 'from the inside out.' When you never miss a day of your skin care routine, regularly drain your lymphatic fluids and take your collagen supplements. But to truly glow, you must also practice mindfulness, self-care and, ideally, transcendental meditation, avoid processed junk and sleep at least eight hours every night. Such are the exacting standards of a contemporary wellness culture that has swelled to encompass nearly every facet of life. Not just the serums we slather on our faces or the Pilates classes we scurry off to but the food we eat (always whole foods), the bowel movements we pass (must be 'firm and beautifully formed') and the very thoughts we let enter our minds (intentional ones only). It sounds like a lot of work. Or one might say it sounds like a lot of work — if it were not so incumbent on a well woman to be perpetually at ease. After talking to Ms. Larocca, 49, for an hour, I learned she did not do everything a well woman should. She tries to sleep a lot. She exercises regularly. And yes, she wears an Oura ring, the latest in wearable tech for tracking one's blood oxygen rate, body temperature and other biometrics. But she does not observe 12-step routines of any kind. She is aware of the fact that dry-brushing may be a great way to exfoliate but that it probably does not drain your lymphatic fluid. Sometimes, she participates in what she calls 'recreational wellness,' something she knows is not likely to achieve what it promises but that nonetheless brings her some form of pleasure. Ms. Larocca, who spent 20 years at New York magazine in various roles including fashion director, is no stranger to the intensely human draw to believe that some of these practices will give her a control over her life and her body that she knows is fundamentally unattainable — which may be the emotional core of our wellness obsession. This conversation, which took place over a matcha latte and an iced green tea, has been edited for length and clarity. Going into your book, I had a much more narrow view of what wellness was. But I was compelled by your more capacious understanding of this world. Wellness is really silly exercise classes. It's also underserved communities talking about how no one takes their health seriously. We can talk about the way the beauty industry uses wellness as a 'get-out-of-jail-free' card when it wants to pretend it's feminist. We can talk about weird colonic therapists. We can talk about wellness as a socially acceptable term for eating disorders. There are 90 million ways to have a wellness conversation. In the end, I tried to say, wellness is all of this and we just live in this messed-up soup. At this point, it seems hard to draw any firm boundaries around wellness. Sometimes you see this when you go to these new medical practices. You're like, 'Am I at a spa? A gym? A boutique hotel? At the doctor? In a Kate Hudson movie?' You started this book before Covid. How was your idea of wellness shaped by the pandemic? It quickly became clear who was getting sick and who was dying from Covid. So the concept that was driving the project — coming at it from the perspective of someone who has written about fashion and style all these years — was that wellness had become this thing where we're being sold our own bodies with the same marketing techniques that people use to sell handbags or shoes or lipstick. It's incredibly dangerous to live in a society that treats health like a luxury product. I liked that you pointed out some of the inconsistencies contained within wellness culture. At one point, you mention the concept of a single well-intentioned cigarette — a little indulgence. It's because all of these things reside within privilege. There's a term, the narcissism of small differences. The things that make someone unwell are so much bigger than whatever little wellness protocol. They're these larger socioeconomic factors. Something I was thinking about as I read was the gendered aspect of wellness, and wellness as a kind of bonding exercise among women — sharing your insecurities, how you want to self-improve, these personal routines. I think it can be. Going to an exercise class with friends or to a spa — it's definitely a bonding ritual for a lot of people. There are wellness social clubs, like Remedy Place. It can also be a form of entertainment or recreation. It's just a question of understanding its position and your expectations. It's important to say here: It's not like I hate wellness. I also participate in a lot of it. I think wellness is too entrenched in our lives to be 'pro' or 'anti.' I love the term 'recreational wellness.' It seems to relate to an experience I often have, which is knowing something is not going to work but doing it anyway. It's a diversion. I exercise a lot — part of it is for recreation, part of it is for actual health. I used to do my red light stuff and drink my collagen. Now I've sort of whittled it down. Every once in a while, a friend of mine will call me and be like, 'My life has been changed by bovine colostrum!' And I'm like, 'I need bovine colostrum!' Recently, I was in a pharmacy filled with beautiful skin care products in an upscale part of Los Angeles. I knew I did not need anything, but I wanted it. And an elegant woman was floating around the store offering to help customers find what suited them. It can really make you feel cared for and cosseted. It can feel really nice! I thought about how it would feel to have all of these things in my medicine cabinet. I would feel like one of the fancy women walking around this neighborhood. Which goes back to the luxury aspect. It's the same feeling of, 'if I purchase this bag. …' Why is the pull so strong? We often know consciously that these products are not going to do what they say they will. Wouldn't it be so great if they did, though? And in the absence of credible information from actual experts, there's this incredible opportunity. We want it to be true, and there's a loss of faith in the systems that are supposed to be protecting us and informing us. And it's on the left and the right. A lot of the Moon Juice products and the Infowars supplements have some of the same types of ingredients. The message on both sides is, 'Prepare yourself for the collapse of the world! Wellness will save us from these terrible inevitabilities!' Something about knowing that there is so much snake oil and bad information out there can also amplify the feeling that somewhere, hidden among these thousands of products, are maybe the two or three that 'actually work.' Totally! I'm like, 'Sometime, one of these Bobbi Brown emails is going to have that tip!' And what if that was the time I didn't click?
New York Times
11-05-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Is the Trillion-Dollar Wellness Industry a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing?
Oh, the irony of cracking open 'How to Be Well' while on vacation in Italy. There, on an island off the coast of Naples, a breakfast buffet included three varieties of tiramisu. Wine was poured not to a stingy fingertip's depth but from a bottomless carafe — at lunchtime, no less. And when stores closed in observance of an afternoon siesta, the only people on the streets were American tourists, jogging. (I was on the prowl for a postage stamp because, yes, I still send postcards.) It was from this place of abundance and balance that I followed Amy Larocca, a veteran journalist, into the hellscape of stringent food plans, cultish exercise routines and medical quackery that have, over the past decade or so, constituted healthy living in some of the wealthiest enclaves of the United States. Blame social media, political turmoil or the pandemic — no matter how you slice it, the view is dispiriting. But Larocca's tour is a lively one, full of information and humor. The book begins with a colonic, 'the flossing of the wellness world,' Larocca writes. We find the author herself on an exam table, 'white-knuckled and curled up like a baby shrimp, naked from the waist down.' She recalls her doctor's disapproval of the procedure — a sort of power washing of the colon — and its risks, including rectal perforation, juxtaposed with one woman's claim that a colonic made her feel like she could fly, like it was 'rinsing out the corners of her psyche.' Where did we get the idea that the body — specifically a woman's body — is unclean inside? A problem to be solved? And how did the concept of wellness bloom 'like a rash,' Larocca writes, into a $5.6 trillion global industry? These are the questions she seeks to answer, using data, history, medicine, pop culture and her own experience. She parses fads and trends, clean beauty and athleisure wear, the gospel of SoulCycle and the world according to Goop. She weighs the advantages and disadvantages of micro-dosing and biohacking. She too goes to Italy, where she attends a Global Wellness Summit featuring a spandex and sneaker fashion show and a presentation on ending preventable chronic disease the world over. At times, Larocca seems to approach her own subject with the same sweep. The second half of 'How to Be Well' reads like a survey course, cramming the industry's relationship to politics, men and the environment into single chapters when each could fill a whole semester. As for why meditation merits more real estate than vaccines, I can only assume that the book was already at the printer when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as health secretary. But when Larocca goes deep, as she does on self-care, body confidence and sex positivity, she's at her best — authoritative and witty, personal without being chummy. She debunks the cockamamie but persistent notion that 'feeling old is not an inevitable byproduct of aging but something easily avoided by paying attention.' (And by forking over gobs of cash; more on this shortly.) After attending an Oprah-sponsored conference on menopause, a subject Larocca has covered for The New York Times, she realizes that 'aging is different from disease' and 'isn't necessarily something to be cured,' let alone through 'neat, tidy, attainable solutions.' Then there's the sneaky rebranding of old-school dieting for 'detoxification,' another wolf in sheep's clothing. Think fasting, juicing, abstaining from all manner of verboten foods. Even if the professed endgame is 'glow,' Larocca makes clear, 'part of the promise is still, always, to rid us of a bit of ourselves.' And finally, refreshingly, she's honest about the money at stake for the wellness-industrial complex — not just for stylists turned wellness coaches or models turned nutritionists, but for massive corporations cashing in on an age of worry. 'None of these institutions is nonprofit; none of these institutions is altruistic at its core,' Larocca writes, in a passage reminiscent of Carol Channing's monologue from 'Free to Be You and Me,' in which she reminded us that happy people doing housework on TV tend to be paid actors. 'It is their job to persuade me to come back,' Larocca continues, 'to spend more money on what they've got to give, to serve their investors, to serve themselves.' And that, as 'How to Be Well' wisely shows us, is the bottom line.
